Tag: the Great Flood in literature
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In the previous installment in this series on the Great Flood in the literary tradition, we saw that the Biblical flood story, unlike its analogs in pagan literature, emphasizes the God who saves, rather than on the man who is saved. The survival of Moses and his family is part of a pattern that marks the relations of God and Man. We’ll come back to that later, but today I want to take a closer look at the man who is saved from the divine destruction that wipes out the rest of humankind.

Unlike the gods of pagan lore, the God of Genesis remains steadfast in his loving Providence. The rainbow is the sign that He keeps his promises.

All three ancient writers were interpreting the same primeval events, trying to probe the same mystery to answer the question: Why? Why would God (the gods) cause or allow such a cataclysmic event as a worldwide flood? And why would He (they) save one particular man while allowing everyone and everything else to perish? The answer to the first question in all three cases is similar: God (the gods) was displeased with the way mankind had turned out, and thought it better to wipe the slate clean, rather than to allow things to go on as they had. Thus the deluge.

WHY THIS MAN?

In the answer to the second question, however, we see more clearly how the perspectives and the intentions of the three writers differ.

The Mesopotamian poet who composed the Epic of Gilgamesh lived in an age when the power of kings made them seem different from ordinary men, almost like gods. He imagined that the man who was saved must have been a powerful king, like Gilgamesh himself. Why else would any god even have noticed him, much less cared enough about him to save him? So Utnapishtim, a godlike king, is given the means to save himself and those of his household, thanks to one god’s warning. Yet the council of the gods as a whole are displeased with his survival and he is “rewarded” by being forced into a godlike, unending exile, far from the new human race that re-peoples the earth. It is almost as if the gods have said to him, “Ha! Think you’re special? Think you can fool us, as if you were one of us? Let’s see how you like living in godlike isolation from mere mortals.” And, as we know, Utnapishtim did not like it much at all. The blessing seemed more like a curse, and this was what he tried to convey to Gilgamesh, striving vainly for godlike immortality.

Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses in a very different age, for a very different audience. He and his readers were jaded sophisticates who probably regarded the Graeco-Roman pantheon of gods as more of a metaphor than a literal reality. We know that Ovid was also at odds with the overweening ruler of his day, and embedded in his poem a warning against rulers who act as if they are gods. In the Metamporphoses, the gods are capricious, often monstrous, in their dealings with mere mortals, particularly in the decision of Jupiter to erase mankind and all living things from the face of the earth. Still, Ovid knew that someone must have survived the flood, two individuals whom his own mythic tradition identified as Deukalion and Pyrrha. The fund of myth from which Ovid drew his story material made it clear that these two were no “mere” mortals, they were demigods, each the offspring of a divine father (the Titans Prometheus and Epimetheus). This, however, did not make them un-killable. They barely survived in their tiny, unprovisioned boat, and only fate preserved them long enough to find themselves stranded on a mountaintop as the flood waters finally receded. In Ovid’s account, no divine hand saves them, but only dumb luck. They survived because they were tough old birds. How fitting, then, that they should restore the human race from stones, so that their posterity would be as tough as stones to survive the vicissitudes of gods and kings.

What about Noah, then? An ordinary man, neither king nor hero, distinguished only by being a “righteous” man, one who didn’t engage in the excesses and depravities of other men. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. […] But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” (Genesis 65-6, 8, RSV-CE). We know that Noah was a family man, with three married sons whom he had raised also to be righteous men. Certainly they were obedient and respectful of their father and cooperated fully with his project to build the huge vessel that we know as the Ark. So Noah is a moral man, a decent chap who behaves as the Lord God intends mankind to behave. He is a good apple, whom God plucks out of a barrel full of rotten apples.

Despite being 600 years old, Noah did not balk at constructing the Ark.

Noah was not outstanding as the world measures such things — not a king nor a demigod — but this story is not being told from a human perspective. God’s judgment, not human judgment, is the measure of a man in this story. As we saw last time, even Joe Blow, our naive reader, could see that Genesis is all about how God views mankind, how He works patiently to remold the human race into something pleasing to Him. As often as human beings deviate from His plan for them (and they’ve done that from the very beginning), he provides a course correction for those who are willing to follow his instructions. Noah, clearly, is one of these. When God says, “Build a gigantic ship and fill it with samples of every living thing,” Noah doesn’t say, “How can I possibly?” Or “What’s in it for me?” Instead, he simply does “all that the Lord commanded Him” — without trying to “improve” on the divine instructions, as Utnapishtim did. Noah alone, of all his generation, obeys the commands of the Lord, and this is what saves him. Not fame, not worldly power or wealth, not divine parentage, but simple obedience to the Lord who made him. He is not godlike, but he is godly.

These simple acts of obedience bear an enormous benefit, not only for the man Noah, but for all living things. Through the obedience of this one man, all of human posterity and every living thing upon the earth is given a fresh, new chance. The slate, truly, has been wiped clean. When the flood waters subside and God instructs Noah to venture out onto dry land, He says to him, as he had said to Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” But He goes farther this time, telling Noah:

“Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Genesis 9:9-11, RSV-CE)

And He leaves the sign of the rainbow as a reminder of this unbreakable promise.

NO ONE IS PERFECT BUT GOD ALONE

Immediately after this, Genesis shows us that human nature may have been given a fresh chance, but it has not been changed. Man can still go astray. Noah, the righteous man, is far from perfect. Now, lording it over the earth as the patriarch of the renewed human race and as the first “tiller of the soil,” celebrating the ability to grow his own food rather than living off of what God provides, Noah literally becomes intoxicated with power, overindulging in the fruit of the vine his hand has planted. He falls down drunk — and naked.

Prelapsarian nakedness is shameful in a post-diluvian world.

Really? This man was the best of all mankind, the only one worth saving? How quickly he has fallen from the heights of virtue. Even worse, he now seems to think himself godlike rather than godly, for when his sons cover his nakedness to shield him from shame, Noah rouses from his drunkenness long enough to curse one and bless the other, a godlike prerogative hitherto unclaimed by the humbler, antediluvian Noah.

Not so godlike, perhaps, because the true God remembers his covenant and does not punish Noah or his posterity. Noah lives on for three hundred and fifty years after the flood, long enough to see the prosperity of his sons and his sons’ sons, until the earth is filled with his offspring.

If Noah had been the hero of this story, the author might well have pruned out the unflattering account of his drunkenness. Why leave it in? First, I believe, to show precisely this: that Noah is not a hero, but an ordinary man. When he trusts in the power of God, he is saved; when he grows drunk with his own power, he falls into disgrace. Second, the author reminds us that Noah is just one man among many in the long history of mankind — he dies, and life goes on. After him there will be good men and bad and, often enough, there will be good men who go bad and wicked men who repent. What does not change is God and His determination to give Mankind another chance, and another, and another. The rest of Genesis, the “prehistory” of mankind, shows this pattern of God repeatedly rewarding those who trust in Him and allowing those who do not to fall through their own wickedness.

WHAT IS A HERO?

Here, then is the great difference between the book of Genesis and the poems of the Gilgamesh poet and Roman Ovid: the hero of the story is God Himself.He it is who must patiently endure the vicissitudes of Man, rather than the other way around. He has the upper hand, yet He uses it only to correct, not to torment. He alone remains true to His promises. The man who would be godlike must be like God in this: His steadfast love for humankind.

Next time, this perspective will become clearer as we situate the story of Noah and the flood in the larger context of the Bible and, particularly, the role that typology plays in understanding the Bible as a whole and this story in particular.

When I started this reading exercise that I call “adventures in comparative mythology,” nearly two years ago, I said that one of the things I hoped to achieve was to get readers to be able to read the story of the Flood in the Bible “with fresh eyes.” So let’s imagine someone doing just that — picking up the Bible for the first time and reading this story, much as we have read the flood accounts in the two long, narrative works we’ve already examined, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Metamorphoses.

You’re never at a loss for great reading, if there’s a Bible on the nightstand.

Let’s give our reader a name — Joe Blow — and an occupation – a traveling salesman. Joe spends a lot of times in hotel rooms — cheap hotel rooms, at that, where the TV is often out of order, so he does a lot of reading and thinking. He has read, for instance, the Epic of Gilgamesh (better than anything on TV!) and even Ovid’s Metamorphoses (it was free on Kindle). Tonight, Joe checks into his motel and flips through 72 cable channels of nothing, berating himself for leaving his Kindle at home on this trip. After a long day of trying to convince people to buy more widgets, he needs something to read before bedtime. So he rummages around in the bedside table and finds a Gideons’ Bible. He has heard of the Bible, of course, but this is the first time he has cracked the cover on one.

God and Man in Genesis

He flips past the table of contents, the introduction, and all the other boring front matter, looking for the beginning of the story. And there it is – chapter 1, Genesis. The beginning of… everything. When the story starts, there is nothing and no one except God. God speaks and says, “Light!” And there is light, where before there was nothing. Who is God talking to when He speaks? Himself. There isn’t anyone else yet. He is thinking aloud. He is pronouncing facts, which come to be even as He says them.

So speaking things into being — that’s one of God’s super-powers, which He uses to create an orderly – and good – world. Joe knows it’s good because, after He makes each thing, God admires His own work and says, “That’s good.” After He has created the heavens and the earth, the sea and the land, all sorts of vegetation and animals – all good – He makes a Man and a Woman, and these two are good, as well, made in the very image of God. God is so pleased with them that He gives them all the other good things He has made. It’s all good! So He takes a rest.

Joe figures he’ll go to bed, too. Maybe he’ll read some more tomorrow night, to find out what else God does, after His rest.

The next night, Joe returns to his motel room, flops back onto the bed, and picks up the Bible again. He thought he had marked the place where he left off last night, but when he resumes reading tonight, he has to double check the bookmark, because the next part is the story of creation all over again. This time, when God makes the man, He breathes His own life into him. Then He makes the woman to be the man’s companion. God gives the pair complete freedom in the beautiful world He has made, even though you might expect Him to want to keep it, since it’s so good and beautiful. (Pretty cushy set-up, Joe thinks. They’ll never have to work for a living or sleep on lumpy motel mattresses.)

But they manage to mess things up right away. God warned these two brand-new people that, although they have all of creation to lord over — and it’s all good stuff — eating fruit of one particular tree will make them know not only good but also evil. So, of course, that’s the first thing they do. Pretty stupid move, Joe thinks, but that’s human nature, ain’t it? And who could help but listen to a talking snake, anyway?

Hanging out in the Garden, before the friendship soured.

It turns out God was not kidding (neither was the snake) when He said that, once they tried the forbidden fruit, the man and woman would know evil as well as good. Bad things start to happen to them — and not just them, but their sons as well. And the next generation, and the next … (Joe knows that every decent story runs on conflict, and suddenly there’s plenty of it). Things get worse and worse until everything gets so bad that God (Joe had kind of forgotten about Him) asks Himself why He ever thought making free human beings was a good idea. The world of man has become a stinking mess, so God decides to cause a great flood that will wash away all the badness …

Joe stops and puts the book down for a minute. This sounds a lot like a story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. That story also started with a god making the world (although it didn’t really say much about the first man and woman). And later on, there was a god (a different one?) who didn’t like the way human beings were behaving, so he decided to destroy them all with a flood. Hmm, is there some plagiarism going on here?

He reads ahead to see if things turn out the same in this version: sure enough, one man and his wife survive the flood, which wipes out everything else. Unlike Deukalion and Pyrrha in Ovid’s story, though, this man, Noah, is warned ahead of time about the coming flood. God wants Noah to survive, so He tells him how to build a boat that will allow him and his family to live through the flood. So now Noah sounds more like Utnapishtim than Deukalion. God even tells him to put all kinds of animals in the boat, so that they’ll survive, too, just as Ea instructed Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh. And, like Utnapishtim, Noah uses birds to find dry land, after the flood waters start to recede.

At this point, Joe wonders if whoever wrote the story of Noah was just creating a mash-up of the other two – there are so many details in common, some like the Gilgamesh story and others like the one in Metamorphoses. But he remembers that the authors of those two flood stories seemed to be getting at different meanings — one was saying that human beings shouldn’t try to be immortal like the gods, and the other emphasized that you’ve got to be tough if you’re going to survive all the trouble that the gods throw at you.

This Bible story doesn’t seem to be saying either of those things. Instead of either sending Noah away into exile, as Enlil did Utnapishtim, or leaving him to figure stuff out on his own, as the gods did in the Metamorphoses, in this story God gives the Earth to Noah, as clean and good as it was in the beginning, and He makes a covenant with Noah and his descendants, promising never to flood the Earth that way again. He even gives him a sign to remind them of His promise. That’s something Joe never saw in the other stories — in those, the gods never would have bothered to try to make friends with mortals. And God keeps his promise, even though Noah gets falling-down drunk right after God saves him. (Wasn’t drunken revelry one of the things that convinced God that most of humankind should be washed away?)

a rocky friendship

Noah and his sons gaze at the rainbow, a sign of God’s faithfulness

Joe reads on to the end of Genesis, noticing that this covenant God makes with Noah is just one of many. From time to time, things turn bad and God has to clean up another mess, but He keeps His promise about not flooding the Earth again. But no matter how bad people get, God keeps making new covenants with them, and sometimes human characters even make a covenant with each other, as if that’s something they’ve learned from God.

When he gets to the end of Genesis, Joe is still trying to figure out if this story has a hero, or if it’s just one of those generational sagas where, right when you get interested in one character, the next thing you know you’re reading all about his great-great grandson. As he puzzles over this, he realizes it might be both. It’s certainly a human story, but there’s not really any single human protagonist. It’s more as if the whole human race were the protagonist, except that every time one of them starts acting like he’s in charge, God reminds him that they are all secondary characters in the overarching plot — God’s plan for humankind.

In fact, the more he thinks about it, the clearer it becomes to Joe what the big difference is between this story and the other two ancient accounts of a Great Flood. In the others, the gods seemed to regard human beings as insignificant, pests even, whom they try to exterminate by flooding the whole Earth. But in Genesis, God floods the Earth to save the decent people (Noah and his family) from all the filthy behavior of the others. He cleans things up and then puts Noah and his family back in charge — pretty much the way He had done with the first man and woman back at the beginning, when everything was good. Back when God walked with them in the Garden.

Then it hits Joe — this is a story about a friendship. A pretty rocky friendship, where one friend is faithful and forgiving, and the other is pretty fickle, but some friendships are like that. In this story, though, the faithful friend never gives up — no matter how many times the fickle friend acts like a jerk, the faithful one is ready, not only to forgive, but to make new promises of faithful friendship. Joe scratches his head. How realistic is that? Shouldn’t it be the fickle friend who promises to be good in the future, not the good friend? And why would anyone in his right mind keep taking back someone who has ignored him and done him dirt so many times?

Maybe putting up with a lot of bad behavior from His friends is another of God’s super-powers. And the fickle friend? Well, that’s a lot of people, maybe all of them. You might say that the fickle friend is Man with a capital M. But while some individuals in this story seem to be truly rotten, taken altogether humankind is not totally faithless, because they keep trying to get back into God’s good graces, even after they’ve really messed up. This thought reminds Joe of a scene right at the end of Genesis, when Joseph, the son of Jacob, faces his brothers (who had sold him into slavery when he was a youngster). Now that he is an important man, right-hand man to the Pharoah, they are trembling with fear that he will his revenge on them. But he says, “Don’t be afraid. All the evil that you intended, God has used to bring about good. So I won’t hold it against you, either.” Joseph, at least, has learned to be faithful to his brothers, even when they don’t seem to deserve it. So even though he says, “Who am I, God?” he really does seem a little bit like Him. A faithful friend, even when others are fickle.

Joe closes the book for the night. Why didn’t anyone ever tell him that the Bible was a buddy story? Because if the first chapter is anything to go on, that’s exactly what it is.

Next time: the Flood in the context of the whole Bible

We’ll let Joe get some sleep now. Next time, we’ll see if he’s right about this being a buddy story, by examining how the Flood account relates to the meaning of the Bible as a whole. If you’re not as well-read as Joe, you can catch up by reading the earlier part of this series, about the flood stories in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Just click the link below.

There is a figure in Greek mythology called Proteus, a minor sea god with two remarkable powers: shape-shifting and oracular utterance. To get the truth out of him, however, one must first catch him. When anyone attempts to grasp him, he rapidly changes from one form into another in an attempt to evade his captor’s clutches. But if a person is tenacious enough to hold on until Proteus tires and resolves into his true form, the god will render up the truth his captor seeks.
Orally transmitted stories share with this mythical sea god a “protean” character. Handed on by word of mouth, each time a story is told the teller gives it a slightly different form and a different shade of meaning, so that over time many different versions of the same story emerge. The literary author who works from an oral tradition is like the hero who captures Procrustes: first he must wrestle with the many versions of the story, but when he finally confers upon it a fixed form, he is able to make it serve him to convey a particular truth.

Taken out of context, the accounts of a great flood that nearly destroyed all living things bear a striking similarity to one another. But in this blog series, I’ve taken pains to put each story in its proper context, in order to see what meaning each writer found in it. I hope that, having looked at the meaning in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we will now be able to see more clearly what makes the Biblical story of the Great Flood stand out from the others. First, though, it might be good to recap what we have learned about the significance of the Flood as it is presented in the other two poems.

Gilgamesh grasps at immortality, but seizes on wisdom

We saw that the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh is presented by Utnapishtim as an object lesson for Gilgamesh, to dissuade him from his mad pursuit of immortality. Gilgamesh, a great king who is “two-thirds divine, and one-third man,” becomes obsessed with immortality after the death of his great friend, Enkidu. Enkidu, struck down by the gods, shares death-bed visions of what awaits him after this mortal life: a great nothingness of rotting bodies and oblivion, something the immortal gods will never suffer. In his determination to escape this dismal fate, Gilgamesh abandons his city to seek out the only man who has ever escaped death, Utnapishtim. A god bestowed immortality on him after he and his wife survived the gods’ destructive flood, but what was intended as a blessing turns out to be a kind of curse. Forced to live far from mortal men, an outcast from the restored human race, Utnapishtim lives an unnatural life of never-ending loneliness. Although he intends to story to dissuade the king from seeking a similar fate, Gilgamesh is not immediately convinced. Eventually, though, he becomes reconciled to the inescapable brevity of human life. This knowledge is the only lasting trophy that he takes with him as he returns to the great city over which he reigns. From now on, he will seek immortality only through the lasting nature of his kingly achievements.

The enduring human spirit

In contrast to the crude but powerful Gilgamesh epic, Ovid’s lengthy poem, Metamorphoses, written nearly two thousand years later, is both more finely wrought and apparently less philosophical. A careless modern reader might easily dismiss Ovid’s poem as an artful mishmash of Graeco-Roman mythology, with an emphasis on erotic love. By focusing on one small section of the rambling poem, however, we saw that there is a more serious, philosophical theme pervading the poem just below its artful surface. Ovid’s account of the Great Flood suggests both the cruelty and capriciousness of the gods — a theme amply illustrated throughout the poem — and the human virtue that allows mere mortals to endure the vicissitudes of life.

In order to emphasize this meaning of the flood story, Ovid leaves out an important detail that most earlier versions of the myth included: he does not say that Deucalion and Pyrrha owe their survival to the forewarning of Deucalion’s immortal father, Prometheus, nor that Prometheus instructed them to build a great chest and fill it with provisions to sustain them after every other source of food has been destroyed by the flood. Instead, Ovid makes it seem as if nothing more than a divine whim ends the flood before they too, last of all mortals, perish in the waters that have destroyed every other living thing.

While the poet, on the one hand, suppresses this important detail, on the other hand he emphasizes another, namely the way the elderly couple replenish the world’s human population. So that the reader does not miss the point, the poet interprets the significance of their producing offspring from stones: “[Thus} the toughness of our race, our ability to endure hard labour, and the proof we give of the source from which we are sprung.” In this way, he harmonizes the meaning of the Flood story with the overall theme of the poem: life consists of constant change, but we mortals, whose life is short and at the mercy of the gods’ fickle affections, are tough enough to endure it all.

We can see that both of these poems, so different from one another, share a preoccupation with human mortality. In fact, in the understanding of the ancient world, mortality was the one characteristic that distinguished men from gods. Both poems suggest that the way to get the most out of life is to accept our human limitations and learn to rejoice in them. We are not gods, nor should we seek to be — how much better to be the best kind of humans!

Next time: A distinctive view of Man and God

In the next post, we’ll look at the Book of Genesis, which provides the immediate context for the Biblical story of of Noah and the Flood. When we do, it will be clear that the Biblical author, working from the same fund orally-transmitted myths that provided story elements for the Babylonian Gilgamesh poet and Roman Ovid, draws a radically different meaning out of them. Perhaps that meaning will help to explain why the story of Noah continues to capture the modern imagination, while the tales of Deucalion and Utnapishtim remain relics of cultures long since lost in the dust of time.

I left the discussion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by saying (as I often do) that, in literature, context is everything. We can’t really grasp the significance of Ovid’s version of the Great Flood unless we consider it in the context of the poem as a whole. So what is this poem really about? How does the early episode that recounts the Great Flood contribute to the overall meaning, and how does the overall meaning color the significance of the Flood account?

The constancy of change

The title hints at the poem’s meaning. Metamorphoses covers all of history (and prehistory), starting with the creation of the world and ending in Ovid’s present day. What might seem, upon a first reading, a rather aimless stitching together of innumerable ancient myths is actually a very careful selection which is tied together by a single commonality: the metamorphoses themselves, one thing being changed into another. Most of these metamorphoses show the gods turning human beings into various non-human things – dolphins, trees, stars, you name it. And why do they do this? In large part, because gods are selfish, possessive – and immortal. When a god desires permanent possession of a mortal person, he (or she) can achieve that permanence only through change – by turning the unfortunate mortal object of his desire into something that can never die. In other words, the key to permanence is change itself.

In case we have missed this point, in the final segment of the poem, King Numa, the successor of Romulus, the founder of Rome, listens to a long lecture by Pythagoras on the idea that flux (change) is the principle on which the whole cosmos is founded: things change into other things. Living things turn into dead things, the dead things decay (more change), the seasons change, everything changes. (The gods may be immortal, but they change their minds constantly.) Change is the one constant in the universe. Numa absorbs this lesson and returns to Rome, changed by the experience, a wiser man for having listened to Pythagoras. Then one king is changed for another, and so on through history, until Julius Caesar himself is murdered in the Senate and gets changed into a god (also a shooting star).

Putting kingship into perspective

This brings us to another theme emphasized in the final two books of the poem, the question of kingship (which, coincidentally, also preoccupied the writer of the Epic of Gilgamesh). Book XIV ends with the death and apotheosis of Rome’s founder, Romulus, while XV ends with the death and divinization of his eventual successor (700 years later), Julius Caesar. Julius, of course, was the adoptive father of the man who came to be known as Caesar Augustus, ruler of Rome in Ovid’s day. There was every expectation that Augustus might also claim divinity, perhaps even before his death. (I said a bit more about this in this post.)

Romulus assumed into the pantheon of the gods

But would this be a good thing, for Rome or for Augustus? Perhaps not. Becoming a god means no longer being a man – which creates a vacancy in the ruler’s seat. Both Romulus and Julius Caesar disappeared at the moment they were assumed into the pantheon of the gods, thereby creating political and social instability – the last thing Ovid’s contemporaries wanted, after thirty years of bloody civil war. The poem ends with what seems to be praise of Augustus but is actually a rather ominous warning. The poet says, in effect, “And now Augustus is ruler! The gods only know how long it will be until he, too, leaves earth to assume his place in the heavens. Let’s hope that he has a long reign before that happens.”

So the poem leaves us thinking about both the constancy of change and the ephemeral nature of kingship. In the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, you should recall, Utnapishtim warned King Gilgamesh against desiring to be made immortal like the gods. Gilgamesh had to be content with “immortalizing” himself by creating works that would long outlive him, giving him undying fame. Ovid’s warning, although less direct than Utnapishtim’s, seems more foreboding: “You want to be a god and lord it over Rome, Augustus? Just remember that the price of godhood is to surrender your manhood; the gateway into the pantheon of the immortals is death.”

The Great Flood and the metamorphosis of the human race

So this is what the poem says: the cosmos is ruled by gods who, if they take a shine to you, are likely to turn you into something you don’t want to be just so they can hang onto you. And the world is ruled by kings who like to think they are gods. The good thing about kings is that they come – and they go. Things change – if things seem bad now, they might be better in a bit (and vice versa).

This view, which pervades the poem, provides the context for Ovid’s account of the Great Flood, which shows how incredibly fickle the immortal gods can be: one minute they are basking in the worship of mortal man, the next minute they are destroying every living thing because one man behaved badly. To this extent, the Graeco-Roman gods are not very different from those in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The sole survivors of the Great Flood beget tough offspring.

But the significance of the flood story lies in what makes it distinctive, not in the ways it resembles the earlier account. The most distinctive feature of Ovid’s flood story, it seems to me, is the way in which the human race is renewed afterward. The only two survivors, Deucalion and Pyrrha, are too old to procreate, but they despair at the thought of being the last people on Earth. So with divine help they create sons and daughters by flinging “the bones of their Mother [Earth]” over their shoulders. These are stones, which then undergo a metamorphosis from stone into flesh and bone. Lest we overlook the significance of this, Ovid points it out: “So the toughness of our race, our ability to endure hard labour, and the proof we give of the source from which we are sprung.”

This toughness and durability allows mankind to endure all the inevitable chances and changes of life. The rest of the poem illustrates just how constant these changes are. If Ovid seems to end the poem with a warning to Caesar Augustus, the King-Who-Would-Be-God, his message to the rest of us mere mortals is more encouraging: “We are tough, we can endure whatever life throws at us. Be strong, endure. In the eternal flux of the cosmos, this is what makes us who we are.”

Coming up: the Biblical account of the Great Flood

Now that we have taken a good look at the stories of the Great Flood in pagan literature, I hope we will be able to see the Biblical account in Genesis with fresh eyes, so that we can discern the significant ways in which the Bible story differs from these others.

Reading, like so much of life, is all about seeing what is to be seen — not only what is visible in a cursory glance, but also patterns that lie beneath the surface to give meaning to the words, not to mention all sorts of little hints and clues “hidden in plain sight,” which provide an extra level of enjoyment and meaning to the attentive reader. So now that we’ve looked at Ovid’s general poetic purpose in writing Metamorphoses, it’s time to take a close look at the episode in which he describes a great flood that destroyed all living things in the ancient world, to see if we can discern the details that can tell us the meaning of this episode within the poem as a whole.

I frequently walk along the shore of the lake shore near my home. I enjoy both the panorama of the vast lake and its farther shore, as well as the fine details of the wildflowers that surround me as I stroll. With the passing of the year, the view is constantly changing, so there is always something new to notice. Usually I carry a camera with me, to take pictures of anything that looks new, unusual, or just interesting. Often, when I upload my photos to my computer and look at them on the monitor, I am startled to see that my camera has captured things that I never noticed with my naked eye, thanks to the 24X zoom lens.

When I looked at Utnapishtim’s account of the great flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh, I began with a panoramic view of the poem and then “zoomed in” to see how Utnapishtim’s story fitted into the larger story of Gilgamesh. Ovid’s Metamorphoses requires a different technique, I believe. The poem is what Aristotle would call an episodic story, a string of discrete events with no real temporal or causal connection. There is neither a clear plot nor an identifiable protagonist. The story of the great flood that destroys (almost) all mankind is merely one tale of transformation amongst many others. Therefore, I propose first to zoom in to look at the flood episode, and then slowly to widen the focus to see what meaningful connections can be found between this episode and the rest of the poem.

The flood account appears in the first of fifteen books (i.e., chapters or sections) in the poem. Book I starts with the creation of the world and its creatures by an unnamed god, and ends with the introduction of Phaethon, a young demigod. The story of the Great Flood occupies the middle of the book, ll. 177-437, describing an event that occurred back near the dawn of time. There is no no surviving witness like Utnapishtim to tell the tale or interpret it for us, so we will have to pay close attention to how the poet invests that event with meaning.

Jupiter’s wrath and destruction, a new race of Man

The story begins with Jupiter’s anger. Jupiter (Zeus) calls the other Olympian gods together in council to tell them that he is worried that humans should not have been allowed to rule the earth. He is especially outraged that one man, Lycaon, behaved barbarously toward him when Jupiter visited him in human guise. Although he has already punished Lycaon by turning him into a wild wolf, Jupiter says that the entire human race must be destroyed. The other gods are equally outraged at Lycaon’s behavior, but many of them doubt the wisdom of destroying the entire race of Man, since this would leave the gods without worshipers, and would allow wild beasts (such as the one Lycaon has become) to roam the world freely. Jupiter placates them by assuring them that all will be put right.

Jupiter’s first idea is to rain down his trademark thunderbolts, but then he recalls that the world is destined to end in fire — he doesn’t want to bring about the end of the world, just to cleanse it of man’s stain. So he decides that water will be a safer means of destruction, and therefore orders the various gods of wind and water to create a great deluge that will drown all humankind.

Rain pours down from heaven, but the seas and rivers also rise up and overflow the earth. Soon it is as if there were no earth, just a boundless ocean. Ovid provides a pitiful description of the ravages of the flood. Men and beasts alike desperately, but fruitlessly, try to escape the rising waters. Houses, ships, crops are destroyed by the relentless deluge. Not only Man but all his works are destroyed, and the world is cast into confusion. Even the most powerful of beasts are helpless, and those people who manage to cling to trees and mountains above the floods die a slow death of starvation. When Jupiter sees that only two mortals survive — and these are decent, pious folk — he orders the waters to recede.

Thus aged Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, in a small boat, find themselves lodged in the heights of Mount Parnassus. (Technically, these two are demi-gods, half-divine offspring of immortal Titans.) But when they realize that they alone of all humankind have survived — and that apparently by chance — Deucalion becomes despondent. They are old and all alone in the world and, unlike their immortal sires who could fashion creatures from the clay of the earth, they have no means of producing offspring.

As they wander the mountaintop on which fate has cast them, the two chance across the abandoned shrine of a local deity, Themis. They promptly prostrate themselves, crying out to the goddess to help the devastated world by telling them how they can produce progeny to restore humankind. She responds with an oracular utterance which, like all oracles, is disturbingly ambiguous: they must leave the sacred precinct with heads veiled and robes ungirt, casting behind them as they go the bones of their great mother. This gives them pause — it would be sacrilege to disturb their mother’s grave, even if they could find it. That being so, they reason, it must not be what the oracle meant, for no god would ever instruct them to commit sacrilege. Deucalion guesses that by “your great mother” Themis must have meant Mother Earth. Her bones, then, would be stones.

With this as their working theory, they decide it won’t hurt to try. So they leave the temple, loosen their clothes, cover their heads, and toss some stones behind them as they go. The stones that Deucalion tosses — mirabile dictu! — turn into men, and those of Pyrrha are transformed into women. Ovid describes in detail how the miraculous transformation occurs, the stones gradually changing shape and then softening into human flesh, and he even ends the description with a little moral: the new race, thus created, is tough and durable like the stones from which they are formed.Once the new race of man has been generated, the Earth herself spontaneously generates other kinds of creatures. The description of these other new living things, however, is not so magical.

Earth spontaneously created other diverse forms of animal life. After the remaining moisture had warmed in the sun’s fire, the wet mud of the marshlands swelled with heat, and the fertile seeds of things, nourished by life-giving soil as if in a mother’s womb, grew, and in time acquired a nature. So, when the seven-mouthed Nile retreats from the drowned fields and returns to its former bed, and the fresh mud boils in the sun, farmers find many creatures as they turn the lumps of earth. Amongst them they see some just spawned, on the edge of life, some with incomplete bodies and number of limbs, and often in the same matter one part is alive and the other is raw earth. In fact when heat and moisture are mixed they conceive, and from these two things the whole of life originates. And though fire and water fight each other, heat and moisture create everything, and this discordant union is suitable for growth. So when the earth muddied from the recent flood glowed again heated by the deep heaven-sent light of the sun she produced innumerable species, partly remaking previous forms, partly creating new monsters. (I:416-37, A. S. Kline translation)

This description is based on the natural philosophy of Ovid’s day, and is therefore intended as a “scientific” explanation of how the earth was repopulated with all sorts of living creatures — including monsters such as Python, an snake so enormous that it covered a mountaintop, so poisonous that Apollo himself has to kill it with his arrows. Thus the flood account gives way to the next episode of transformation.

Details worth noticing

Did you notice the tiny grasshopper? Neither did I, until I zoomed in.

As we begin to think about what Ovid is trying say with this tale, we can start by noticing how this story of the Great Flood differs from the more ancient one in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The first significant difference is that Ovid, unlike the Gilgamesh poet, provides a motive for the destruction of mankind. The Gilgamesh poem doesn’t attempt to conjecture what brought on divine wrath, saying simply, “The hearts of the Great Gods moved them to inflict the Flood.” In the Metamorphoses, on the other hand, a single god, the greatest of them all, Jupiter, is moved to destroy humankind, and he easily persuades the other gods to help in this endeavor, despite the misgivings of some of the others.

Utnapishtim said that some of the gods, after the fact, saw the problems stemming from the destruction of the human race, but only was because humans were, for the Mesopotamian gods, a kind of slave race that catered to their needs. In Ovid’s account the Olympians do not “need” mortal man, although they do enjoy the fragrant sacrifices that humans offer them. Yet some of the gods upset by Jupiter’s plan of destruction recognize that the world needs humankind even if the gods do not. Why? To govern the earth. Even Jupiter himself seems to acknowledges the beneficial role played by mankind, for he reassures his fellow deities with a promise that the destroyed race will be replaced.

The need for the human race

If we have read the poem from its beginning, we will understand why mankind was deemed, in some way, “necessary.” The early lines of the poem describe how, in the beginning, some unnamed god created the ordered Cosmos not ex nihilo (as Christians believe) but by creating order out of chaos (chaos, in this sense, is unformed primal matter). Chaos, before the divine touch, was not really “something,” it simply had the potential to become something.This chaotic, unformed matter was a seething mass, in which various potentialities strove against one another. The creative act of the god was to give that chaotic matter form, allowing it to fulfill its potential, and order, ending strife. Thus the creator transforms primal matter into light and dark, earth and sky, seas and dry land. The winds are separated and sent to their corners, and the stars twinkle in the heavens as the gods take their places. Then the Earth is filled with creatures of the sky and sea and land. Finally, the creator takes the clay of the earth and fashions the first man:

But one more perfect and more sanctified,
a being capable of lofty thought,
intelligent to rule, was wanting still
man was created! Did the Unknown God
designing then a better world make man
of seed divine? or did Prometheus
take the new soil of earth (that still contained
some godly element of Heaven’s Life)
and use it to create the race of man;
first mingling it with water of new streams;
so that his new creation, upright man,
was made in image of commanding Gods?
On earth the brute creation bends its gaze,
but man was given a lofty countenance
and was commanded to behold the skies;
and with an upright face may view the stars:
and so it was that shapeless clay put on
the form of man till then unknown to earth. (I:76-88, Brooks More, trans.)

So man was made “in image of commanding Gods”; this is why men stand upright with “lofty countenance” to “behold the skies” and “view the stars,” while four-legged “brute creation bends its gaze” toward the earth, in search not of transcendent truths but merely its next meal. In other words, men were given rational powers so that they might govern the Earth just as gods govern the Cosmos.

This is a distinctly Roman idea, one not found in Greek mythology. The Roman historian Sallust, for instance, in the preface to his history of the Catiline War, alludes to the connection between man’s upright stance and his rational powers, while Cicero in De Re Publica — specifically, in the surviving portion known as the Dream of Scipio— amplifies the idea that man’s god-given task is to govern the earth.

So it was to fulfill this noble purpose that man was first created. But the first race of man was fashioned from clay, and ultimately proved unworthy of the task of governing the world, since many men, like Lycaon, were hardly able to govern themselves. We might imagine, then, that this is why Man 2.0 is made from stone rather than clay. This is not, however, the explanation that Ovid gives; instead, he says, “[S]o are we hardy to endure / and prove by toil and deeds from what we sprung.” (I:414-15).

A fate larger than god

For the moment, let’s put aside the question of why the poet imposes this interpretation. We’ll come back to it in a later post. Right now I’d like to look at one other striking way in which this account differs from that provided by the Gilgamesh poet. Utnapishtim survived the flood because he had been forewarned by the god Ea, who instructed him in the means of survival. Deucalion and Pyrrha, however, get no such divine help. This is especially remarkable when we consider that each of the elderly survivors could boast of a divine parent, but either Prometheus (father of Deucalion) nor Epimetheus (sire of Pyrrha) helps them to survive, nor does any other god. The couple seems to have survived by chance, ill-prepared as anyone, alone in their little boat without provision.

But, one might object, Jupiter saved them, didn’t he? When he first announced his plan of destruction, he declared:

“Beneath my sway are demi-gods and fauns,
nymphs, rustic deities, sylvans of the hills,
satyrs;—all these, unworthy Heaven’s abodes,
we should at least permit to dwell on earth
which we to them bequeathed.” (I:192-5)

He seems to be acting in accord with these words when he recalls the flood as soon as he notices that only Deucalion and Pyrrha remain, demigods both. Jupiter also reassured the other deities when he “promised them a person different from the first, of a marvelous creation” — and this is exactly what happens. Does this not prove that Deucalion and Pyrrha survive with Jupiter’s help, and for his purpose?

Jupiter, being high as well as mighty, can see a larger fate. But it makes him unmoved by mortal suffering.

Well, no, not exactly. Foreknowledge is not causation — Jupiter knew what would happen, but he did not cause it to happen. Although the greatest of the gods, whom none of the others dares cross, he is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. More powerful than any other deity, he is not all-powerful — after all, he needs the cooperation of the other gods to create the worldwide deluge. And though he can foresee the outcome, his knowledge is not the same as control — he is aware of fate, but he does not cause it. Recall that Jupiter’s first idea was to destroy humankind with thunderbolts — but then he remembered that the world was fated to end in fire, and he feared being the one who would bring it about. Similarly, it would appear that he predicted the miraculous creation of a new kind of mortal not because he intended to make it happen but simply because he foresaw that it would happen. Jupiter is instrumental in allowing Deucalion and Pyrrha to survive the flood, but that is not to say that their preservation is part of any plan of his. Neither does he himself create the new human race — no more than he created the first one.So who does turn those rocks into men and women — Themis? Again, I think not. Themis merely tells them what to do, but does not necessarily make it happen. Perhaps it is the unnamed demiurge, the anonymous god who first ordered the world out of chaos. We can’t know for sure, neither does the poet claim to know. It happens like magic, no explanation needed nor offered. A mystery, pure and simple. The world needed humans, so humans there were.Notice, though, that while other species were spontaneously generated from the earth, the miraculous reinvention of mankind requires the cooperation of the two flood survivors. This is another significant way in which this story diverges from Utnapishtim’s tale. Utnapishtim and his wife were given immortality and then banished to the ends of the earth, while elderly Deucalion and Pyrrha remain mortal and are instrumental in the creation of a new mankind.

Meaningless without context

Ovid’s account of the Great Flood, taken on its own, seems to make even less sense than the story told by Utnapishtim. Utnapishtim had a clear message he intended to convey with his story — “don’t grasp at immortality, because it will not provide happiness.” He learned this the hard way, and wanted to spare Gilgamesh his own troubles. Ovid’s version is not so easy to interpret. Should we just accept it as merely one of many instances of transformation? If that were the case, then we would have to accept that the poem as a whole — which is, after all, one long string of transformation stories — is itself equally meaningless. Meaningless? Ovid would roll over in his grave if he thought we were going to dismiss his artful poem so cavalierly!

It looks, then, as if we are going to have to get some idea of the poem as a whole, and then figure out how the Flood story fits into that larger schema. That’s a pretty big task, which we’ll tackle in the next installment of our Adventures in Comparative Mythology. So let me reiterate the advice I offered last time: read at least all of Book I and all of Book XV, with a liberal sampling of the stories in between. You can find at least two good translations online, this poetic one and this one in prose. Read well and prosper!

Without context, we can’t tell where we are, or what we’re looking at.

Recently, we took a close look at the account of the Great Flood that appears in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh and found that, although it superficially resembles a similar account found in the Bible, its meaning was shaped by its context in the story. Context is always crucial for understanding anything — if you see a circle drawn on a page, without seeing it in relation to something else, you can’t tell if it’s mean to represent a ping pong ball, the Earth, or a freckle. The same is true when we are reading — you can’t understand what a story is intended to mean if you don’t know something about who is telling it, to whom he’s telling it, and in what circumstances or for what purpose. So as we now consider the Great Flood account in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, once again context will be crucial if we want to see what Ovid was getting at.

Before we look at the context of the Flood account within the larger poem, then, we need to consider the rhetorical context, that is, who wrote it, when, and for whom, as well as the kind of thing it is.

A poem without peer

Let’s start with the last first: what kind of writing is The Metamorphoses? It’s a long poem that knits together many stories from Graeco-Roman mythology, and sets them in order, roughly, from the creation of the world up to the poet’s present day. All of the myths woven into this larger whole were selected because they are stories of literal transformation (metamorphosis) — people being changed into things, and (less frequently) things into people, at the whim of some god or other.

If the Metamorphoses has a hero, it must be Love itself.

Scholars, who like to classify literary works into specific genres, disagree about whether this poem can be called an epic, because it seems to lack an identifiable hero. Some say that Eros (Roman Cupid) is the hero, although heroes, strictly speaking, are never gods. Heroes are always mortals, probably because gods cannot change and change (transformation) is essential to any good story. At any rate, the god Eros/Cupid himself does not actually appear in most of these stories, although erotic passion (in the sense that I discussed that term here in an earlier post) is a theme that connects the stories.

The fact is, The Metamorphoses is sui generis, i.e., in a category all its own, which I believe is exactly what the poet wanted. It is unlike any other poem before or since. By the time this poem was written, epic was already a well-tested genre (it was written nearly two thousand years after the Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance). Composing an epic was usually the capstone of a poet’s career, attempted only when his skills had acquired their highest polish. Vergil’s great epic of Roman beginnings, The Aeneid, completed about ten years before The Metamorphoses, was the first (only) great Roman exemplar of the form, and Ovid no doubt felt it unwise to compete directly with such a masterpiece. At any rate, we should note that by this time epic is definitely a literary genre with a long pedigree. By “literary,” I mean not only that is was written (not passed on orally, as more ancient poems had been), but that it makes deliberate, albeit often oblique, reference to earlier written poems. The poet could expect his readers to be familiar with these earlier stories and recognize the references.

Written for an educated and sophisticated audience

So let us consider who his intended audience was. These would primarily have been educated people above the middle social rank in Rome, sophisticates and would-be sophisticates alike, including those who had enjoyed and admired Ovid’s earlier works. Of his various poetic works, the two that are best-known today are his Amores (“The Loves,” poems chronicling a love affair) and Ars Amatoria(“The Art of Love,” or how to seduce and keep a woman), as well as his Remedia Amoris(“The Cure for Love,” how to get over a past love affair). These earlier poems develop some of the ideas embedded in The Metamorphoses, for instance, that love is fickle and, while it can be sweet, it can also be a kind of affliction. By making love a pervasive theme in The Metamorphoses, the poet is able to make oblique reference to his own past poetic triumphs, as well as to other literary predecessors.

By a poet who wants to make a name for himself

A provincial lad made good, Ovidimmortalized himself through his poetry,yet died in ignominious exile.

That brings us to the question of who the author was. He is known to modern readers as Ovid, but his full name was Publius Ovidius Naso. He was a Roman citizen, although not a native of the city itself but from the provincial town of Sulmo. He went to Rome for his education and stayed to make a name for himself, much as young writers and artists today gravitate to New York or Los Angeles. To put that career in historical perspective, we should note that the year before Ovid was born in 43 B.C. Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome, was assassinated in the Senate by his friends and associates because they suspected that he was going to let himself be declared King of Rome. This event precipitated a long, bloody civil war which culminated in Julius’s adopted heir, Octavian, becoming Rome’s first Emperor. Octavian, under the name Caesar Augustus, was still reigning when Ovid finished the Metamorphoses around A.D. 8, the year Augustus exiled Ovid to the far ends of the empire (Pontus, on the Black Sea), and banned his books from Rome. Ovid, like Icarus, had been a high flier, but he suffered a mighty fall: Pontus was regarded — probably rightly so — as the arse-end of the mighty Roman empire, a most ignominious place to wind up. Ovid died there in A.D. 17 or 18, just a year or so before Augustus himself.

As a response to perilous times

Thus the poet’s entire life was bracketed by the rule of the man we know today as Caesar Augustus, a fact that I believe is highly significant if we are to understand The Metamorphoses and Ovid’s version of the Great Flood story. Ovid — like his contemporaries Livy, the famous historian of Rome, and Vergil, the poet who composed the Aeneid, an epic glorifying the great Trojan progenitor of Rome — wrote, to one degree or another, in response to the civic upheavals through which they lived. In Ovid’s case, his response was largely to turn away from bombastic nationalism and devote his poetic talents to the apparently more trivial topic of love.

Why love? First, perhaps, because love is notoriously fickle, always changing, so it fits with the theme of transformation. For another reason, because lighter fare goes down more easily in troubled times. Also, love was a subject in which Ovid was already well-versed. But finally, I believe, because this “apparently trivial” topic provides an attractive screen for a more serious underlying purpose, one that the poet did not wish to address more nakedly. I will have more to say anon about what I believe that graver purpose was.

The Fall of Icarus, attr. Pieter Brueghel the ElderAs with the Metamorphoses which inspired it, there is more going on herethan is immediately apparent.

At any rate, despite the obvious differences, I think Ovid’s purpose was similar to that of Livy in his Ab urbe condita, his history of Rome, and Vergil in the Aeneid: to reassure his readers, living through shocking and demoralizing times, of certain enduring truths while also reminding them of the lessons of the past lest they be repeated in the present. The truth that seems to drive The Metamorphoses is not, as Vergil’s epic affirms, that Rome has an undying, god-given destiny to rule world, nor, as Livy’s history shows, that good governance requires both prudence and adaptability, but rather that “the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself.” Hence Ovid’s subject, transformation (metamorphosis), the whole history of the world presented as a series of one thing changing into another.

Next time: Ovid’s story of the Great Flood

There is plenty more that could be said about the rhetorical and literary context of this poem, but that’s enough to be getting on with. In the next installment, I’ll look more closely at the poem as a whole and the way the Flood story fits into it.

If you have not read The Metamorphoses, there are some good English translations online, such as this one at the Perseus Project Online or this one by A. S. Kline. For our purposes, I recommend reading at least all of Book I and all of Book XV, with some liberal sampling of what goes on in between (it doesn’t much matter which middle bits, since there is not much “plot” to tie them together). Until next time, read well and prosper!

The real test of literature is whether it continues to speak to us, after generations or even millennia. We’ve almost finished our examination of the Epic of Gilgamesh and its account of the Great Flood. All that’s left is to ask what enduring truths, if any, we find in this poem. Is this poem simply an archaeological curiosity, or does it still have something to offer modern readers?

At first glance, it might seem not. The world that gave rise to this poem is very remote from us, not only in time but in culture. Its human figures seem barbaric and its callous and capricious gods are inscrutable — even Utnapishtim does not try to explain their actions. But when we consider enduring truths, we have to move past cultural differences, which can be distracting. As a whole, it seems to me, the poem is about learning to accept our human limitations, something that can be especially difficult for a man like Gilgamesh, who excels ordinary mortals in so many ways. He has power, wealth, wisdom, beauty, strength in abundance, making him believe that he can (and should be able to) grasp at immortality as well.

Our modern world may not have the kind of super-powerful kings that dominated the ancient Near East, but that is not to say that we don’t have plenty of rich, powerful people who try to exercise godlike power over us “mere mortals.” Are those who use their wealth to limit population in parts of the world that they deem over-populated (Africa, Asia, Latin America) so very different from the Mesopotamian gods who decided that humankind had become too populous and needed to be destroyed by a flood? The daily news seems to be full of stories of the rich and famous who feel free to seduce innocents and crush the weak, much as Gilgamesh before Enkidu humanized him. So it would seem that the problems posed in the Epic of Gilgamesh are still with us.

The quest for immortality

During his friendship with Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s excesses were not so much restrained as they were redirected to more constructive ends (killing monsters that had been terrorizing the countryside). In his last days, though, Enkidu infected Gilgamesh with despair by sharing his visions of the afterlife in the House of Dust:

… the house where those who enter do not come out,
along the road of no return,
to the house where those who dwell, do without light,
where dirt is their drink, their food is of clay,
where, like a bird, they wear garments of feathers,
and light cannot be seen, they dwell in the dark,
and upon the door and bolt, there lies dust.
On entering the House of Dust,
everywhere I looked there were royal crowns gathered in heaps,
everywhere I listened, it was the bearers of crowns,
who, in the past, had ruled the land …
(Tablet VII, Kovacs translation)

This vision is what drives Gilgamesh to seek immortality — he does not intend to be like all those kings who now dwell impotently in unending darkness. Today’s rich and powerful may not believe in a dreary afterlife, but their materialist assumptions nevertheless drive them to use their wealth to pursue a physical immortality, which medical technology promises is just around the corner.

Scientism is a dreary, dogmatic ideology which holds that we can know everything — but that “everything” does not include any metaphysical reality.

Probably the first attempt to literally escape mortality came over the horizon in the late 1960s and early 1970s: cryonic preservation, an attempt to preserve the body at the moment of death by storing it at very low temperatures, until such time as medicine comes up with a cure for whatever had brought the person to death’s door. The fad may have passed, but there are still companies today that promise this kind of “immortality,” and these companies store thousands of bodies waiting for the resurrection that their original inhabitants believed science could offer.

Then, there are those, such as the 2045 Strategic Social Initiative, who propose “to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality.” Even if one trusts in the promises of such measures, however, most of us would find these alternatives as repellent as the House of Dust envisioned by Enkidu.

When Gilgamesh learned that immortality was out of his reach, he settled for “second best,” a plant that could provide continual physical rejuvenation. Modern medical technology seems to offer us a similar alternative, promising that, any day now, we will be able to rejuvenate our joints, organs, bones, blood, and even DNA so that we will be able to attain fabulous ages without the physical debility associated with old age. In the mean time, many rely on cosmetic surgery, bizarre diets, and relentless exercise to keep their bodies “young.”

How many, though, stop to think what benefit they are getting from the extra months or years of life they may attain by these methods? Are they using them to create anything of lasting value? Perhaps they, like Gilgamesh, fail to consider what the real purpose of life is — and, like Utnapishtim, they may realize the foolishness of this oversight only when it is too late.

As much as he craved immortality, I doubt Gilgamesh would have wanted his mind transferred to a holographic avatar.

It seems to me the Epic of Gilgamesh is not so much about the unattainability of literal immortality as it is about the wisdom of accepting and appreciating the limitations of our mortal life. Utnapishtim clearly intends his story about the Great Flood as a warning against the mad pursuit of immortality — and he speaks as one who knows. Even if Science, the modern, materialist god we have created for ourselves, should be able to confer literal immortality upon us, should we welcome such a gift? Utnapishtim would say No.

What do we stand to lose if we insist on making ourselves into immortal, godlike creatures? Will such godlike immortality come only at the price of our humanity? These are questions that need not be relegated to science fiction for, as we have seen, such questions were raised by heroic epic, as long as four thousand years ago. It has been said that those who remain ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. We might say something similar about ancient poetry. If we fail to read it and to heed its wisdom, we will continue to make the same mistakes, age after age. The modern-day Gilgameshes of the world should take heed.

Next: The flood in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

We’ll continue our “adventures in comparative mythology” when we take up the account of the Great Flood in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. If you haven’t read the poem, you can find it online in both a poetic English translation and a modern prose translation. The account of the Great Flood is found in Book I. To put the story in context, I strongly suggest reading at least Book I in its entirety (it’s less than 800 lines).

As you read, you’ll undoubtedly be thinking about what Ovid’s flood tale has in common with its Mesopotamian original. But, more importantly, you should consider what its distinctive features are and what they seem to suggest. How do they respond to the theme of the poem announced in the opening lines? What view of gods and man are set out in this early part of this lengthy poem?

Retired from college teaching, I'm now a freelance editor and writer living in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. When I'm not working for other writers, I'm busy writing books, novels, and short stories, or blogging about literature and the moral imagination on my blog, A Catholic Reader.